Review ~ The Accidental Socialite by Stephanie Wahlstrom.

Quirky and clumsy twenty-two-year-old Paige Crawford arrives in London on a cold Saturday in January. Just when Paige starts to think that moving thousands of miles away from home with no real plan was a bad idea, Jason Frost appears. Confident and classy, Jason is the complete opposite of Paige and just what she needs in her life, or so she thinks.

But before their romance has time to blossom, Paige trips and falls into the arms of a mysterious man on a drunken night out. She’s snapped by paparazzi, and newspaper headlines the next day suggest that she’s having an affair with a married footballer.

Paige finds herself instantly elevated to tabloid celebrity status which isn’t exactly a picnic, particularly when trying to juggle her new job at Fashionista magazine, a catalog of dating disasters and a nagging doubt that she maybe she can’t conquer London after all.

When a trip back to Canada for Christmas reminds Paige why she left her old life behind, she returns to London with renewed vigor realizing that while jobs, flats and men may come and go, friends in London are forever.

Review:

The Accidental Socialite was fast-paced, maybe a bit too fast-paced to allow for full character development but as for a light-hearted read, this book was brilliantly entertaining! It was quick and all out fun – a great choice of book for those wanting a pick-me-up or something just to plaster a smile on your face.

Oh Paige – bless her – she didn’t have much luck! Her life seemed to roll from one ridiculous event to another and this book had me cracking up the whole way through. I laughed a whole lot through The Accidental Socialite and at times I just wished all books could be as fun as this one. Stand out moments for me were the Pilates class and Paige’s Fall for Fanny’s proposal which had me sat with a big stupid grin on my face.

The other characters, I don’t think we learnt too much about and at the beginning, I was getting confused by all the names and forgetting who they actually were. However, as the book went on, the two side characters which I really loved were Carlos and Lucinda. Carlos, the gay best friend, I thought was going to be ridiculously bitchy but actually he was fun and supportive and I liked his loyalty to Paige.

The Accidental Socialite was wonderful escapism – they say celebrity culture is a great thing to distract ourselves from our own lives and what better way than to laugh at the antics of a Z-list celebrity in a fabulous book?! Honestly, this book was a bit of a surprise package for me as I didn’t expect to love it like I did. As much as it was easy to laugh at Paige’s misfortune, she was a sweet character and easy to root for too, making The Accidental Socialite a wonderfully amusing book.

About the Author:

Growing up in Edmonton, Canada, a significant amount of Stephanie’s time was spent making up and acting out stories. She was studying to be an actress when she realized there weren’t any parts for women being written. So, Stephanie wrote herself a short screenplay just to be in it, and quickly realized that writing was her true passion. She graduated from the University of Alberta with an English and Sociology degree and she also has a Bachelor of Motion Picture Arts from Red Deer College. After a fateful trip to Mexico in 2006, Stephanie decided to move to New York City to work in film development. A year later she went back home to write My Green House, a factual TV series. Stephanie moved to London in 2008 and aside from being obsessed with eggs benedict, fruit roll- ups and travelling, she also works in children’s television. The Accidental Socialite is her first novel.